Saturday, January 26, 2008
Okay, this is the last post to flush from my mental queue for the night.
I was at dinner with a family in my mum's church group last week and I had some interesting discussions with the father.
One small one left me depressed the rest of the night. We were discussing my situation and how directionless I feel. He was quick to blame this on my having had a "classic liberal education." I looked up liberal education and it is characterized by wikipedia as such: "Usually global and pluralistic in scope, it includes a general education curriculum which provides broad exposure to multiple disciplines and learning strategies in addition to in-depth study in at least one academic area." He feels that this type of education does not prepare people for the real world and makes people quite adept at finding the problems in things and why they cannot work rather than finding and exploiting opportunities. Furthermore, he said that he has seen hundreds of people in my type of situation of hopelessness, directionlessness, and passions repeatedly blunted into despair. I figured that if he has seen that many people in this type of situation then clearly he must know techniques to help me recover from it, so I asked him how those people usually get out. His answer: "they usually don't." Fuck.
We also had a conversation on mormonism which rather intrigued me. He straightforwardly admitted to me that he thinks that agnosticism is the most honest belief in religion and that those who claim to know various religious facts are stupid. He admitted that he doesn't know if much of the mormon mythology about Joseph Smith and such is true. He is, however, a fully practicing mormon and teaches all of these stories to his family and endorses them in church and doesn't feel the slightest bit of dissonance about it. How can this be you might ask and indeed I wondered myself. The way he approaches it is that he looks at the groups of people who are overrepresented in large corporations, government, finance, etc. To him, these groups include mormons, jews, arabs, and one other that I can't remember. He also examines systems and what results they produce. So, he sees that mormons are so overrepresented in these fields and he sees the happy families and such and then believes that regardless of whether all of the things taught in the system are true or not, they bring good results and therefore are worth following. Because he lives in the western United States, mormonism is a fairly dominant culture in some areas and so therefore to him, it makes the most logical sense that if one wants to be successful in these areas, they should follow mormonism. They shouldn't care if the teachings have any basis in reality or not, but simply accept that following them will generally lead to the results they want. He believes that his beautiful wife and his good children are a direct result of having bought into the mormon social structure and going on a mission and such. Had he been born into a jewish or muslim area, I think he would have followed those systems with equal vigour.
He is convinced that part of my situation of being kind of drifting is the fact that I separated myself from that treadmill system and did not replace it with something else. While I did concede that this idea may have some merit, I also explained that I require a basis in truth and that my moral system dictates that I must, if necessary, reduce efficiency or success in order to maintain truth. His belief was that the fact that the mormon system works to produce the results he wants makes the system "true" in the only way that really matters in the end, in a pragmatic rather than theoretical sense.
So, while I found the discussion fascinating as this was a point of view I'd never heard before, I simply can't justify it to myself. I'm curious to hear others' thoughts on it and how his point of view may relate to other philosophies since I don't suppose he came up with it on his own.